Fucking U.S. customs....

[Scribble]

This is not new. This has been happening to Muslims sense 9-11. It just hasn’t touched ‘you’ - the non-muslim ‘you’. It’s been touching all dark skinned people for about a year now. And it is just starting to touch white skinned people.

As a fairly white (very Jewish looking) American, I can tell you that it touched some of us PDQ. My younger sister is very Middle Eastern-looking, and she’s been selected for the “random” check each of the three times she’s flown in the past year or two.

She was in Germany during 9-11 and had a heck of a time coming home several days later. Customs didn’t treat her as badly as they did Ms. Cruz, but she got pulled aside for “questioning” (interrogation would be a better term here) and had her luggage torn through in a search for Heaven knows what.

From what she told me about her experience with the US customs people, she was really terrified and pretty humiliated.

[Eats_Crayons]

*Originally posted by wolfman *
**An Indian, with a hispanic name, and a Canadian passport is unusual and suspicious, and it should get a second glance by an immigration officer. **

Please! In the melting pot of North America? I’m a hispanic woman with a German last name, an Egyptian first name, a Canadian passport, and I’m half Scottish.

And I’m not considered particularly unusual.

[matt_mcl]

An Indian, with a hispanic name, and a Canadian passport is unusual and suspicious.

Even if the ludicrous principle behind this had any backing, the fact is that a “Hispanic” name is not unusual for a person of Indian descent. The Portuguese had trading counters in India for hundreds of years. Where do you think the name “Bombay” came from? And how does the Canadian passport enter into it? Do you think all Canadians are white?

[Orbifold]

You know what the really sad thing is? When I first heard of this story yesterday, one of my first thoughts was “Well, at least she made it back to Canada.” Maher Arar, by contrast, is still in Syria.

Not that Maher Arar’s fate reduces the magnitude of this atrocity, of course. I’m guessing that despite wolfman’s tale of woe that the Canadian immigration authorities didn’t deport him to a third country (like what happened to Maher Arar) or destroy his passport and nearly cost him his job (like what happened to Berna Cruz).

The INS has apparently degenerated into a band of malicious, lackwitted thugs.

[Anonymous_Coward]

If I recall correctly, as of May 2002 the Canadian passport had been redesigned with a ton of new security/anti-tampering devices added.

I wonder if she had the new type of passport, and if it would have made a difference (not that it matters)?

[wolfman]

And how does the Canadian passport enter into it?

If your making a fake passport(or fake id or anything) one of the common thoughts is that if you don’t use the one the checker sees most often, there is less chance that they will notice if there is a mistake. so it adds an element of suspicion.

The Portuguese had trading counters in India for hundreds of years.

No shit. However in my experience 99% of Indians don’t have Hispanic names, and if does there is a chance it is a fake name, and adds another element of suspicion.

Things that just don’t seem normal are suspicious. If a white kid that looks like Haley Joel Osmont tries to buy beer with an ID that says Ramujan Nahasapemitelilon, the clerk should be suspicious and take other steps to insure that it is real. That’s what having a brain is for. Proccessing information and determining what doesn’t quite seem right. Now determining a course of action based on the suspicion level is more difficult, and those INS fucked up.

We all realize that making sound judgements is dependant upon analyzing the situaton, and racial recognition is often part of the situation. Cops harass white guys in black neighborshoods because they assume they are looking for drugs. It’s a pain in the ass for me personally , but the cops are right, a huge percentage of the guys are looking for drugs, or have already bought them. It’s a fine line between judicious and discriminatory, but it’s sure as hell better than all this pretending shit

[kung_fu_lola]

Coward, can you tell by looking at the picture with the article? I don’t know anything about the new passports, so I can’t. Just wondering.

Also have to say: Fucking U.S. customs… is an exhaustive undertaking that requires a lot of lube.

There. I feel better now.

[the_Lady]

Uh, Wolfman?

I’m with matt…You are aware that not all Canadians are white?

And I have a French last name, and I’m not French, or even Quebecois…

[Orbifold]

*Originally posted by wolfman *
Things that just don’t seem normal are suspicious. If a white kid that looks like Haley Joel Osmont tries to buy beer with an ID that says Ramujan Nahasapemitelilon, the clerk should be suspicious and take other steps to insure that it is real. That’s what having a brain is for. Proccessing information and determining what doesn’t quite seem right. Now determining a course of action based on the suspicion level is more difficult, and those INS fucked up.

No fucking shit they fucked up!!! We’re not talking about a convenience store clerk telling a kid to leave the store, we’re talking about a woman having her passport destroyed before being herded onto a plane to a country where she isn’t a citizen!!! If the pilot hadn’t taken pity on her and contacted a Canadian consulate in Kuwait, she might have been denied entry in India, and then what the hell would she have done then? As it is she nearly lost her job because it took her four days to get back to Canada!

The INS came within an inch of destroying this woman’s life, and you’re making comparisons to a convenience store clerk checking for ID? Holy flurking shit.

**Cops harass white guys in black neighborshoods because they assume they are looking for drugs. It’s a pain in the ass for me personally , but the cops are right, a huge percentage of the guys are looking for drugs, or have already bought them. It’s a fine line between judicious and discriminatory, but it’s sure as hell better than all this pretending shit **

“Judicious”. Do you even realize what happened to this poor woman? The INS officers who did this couldn’t even see “judicious” if they borrowed a fucking telescope. And then they’d deport the telescope.

Being hassled by cops DOES NOT COMPARE to deported on nothing but a suspicion…and lest we forget, being denied an opportunity to contact the Canadian consulate to boot. The cops would at least have let you contact a lawyer.

Christ, this is making me more angry the more I think about it…

[MysteryFellow63427]

You know what the real tragedy is here? It’s so hard to fire a federal employee that it’s unlikely the INS worker will get canned for causing a very ill-timed international incident.

[TeaElle]

Last time I checked, married women often have last names which may represent an ethnicity other than their own. Last time I checked, people from India were still free to emigrate just about everywhere in the world which allows immigration – she could’ve been an ethnic Indian with the last name Constantinopolis living in Canada but holding UK citizenship having been born in the United Arab Emirates and it wouldn’t matter.

What needs to be addressed:

• What is INS policy with regard to the appropriate procedure to follow in questions of a foreign citizen travelling under what is suspected to be a false passport?
• What particular aspect of Mrs. Cruz’s passport considered suspect by this one official?
• Why was one person (apparently) permitted to make this decision without consultation with any one else?
• If it turns out that the official’s actions (though obviously not his nasty attitude) were within the boundaries of policy, why does policy not permit foreign nationals in this situation to be held in custody pending consular assistance – which could prove or disprove such allegations – before deportation?

[matt_mcl]

If your making a fake passport(or fake id or anything) one of the common thoughts is that if you don’t use the one the checker sees most often, there is less chance that they will notice if there is a mistake. so it adds an element of suspicion.

What? What the fuck does this even mean? Why in the world would you think that a Canadian passport would not be “one that the checker sees most often” to an agent in the United States?? We’re their biggest trading partner! This is completely incoherent.

[Cat_Whisperer]

*Originally posted by feath *
**This is not new. This has been happening to Muslims sense 9-11. It just hasn’t touched ‘you’ - the non-muslim ‘you’. It’s been touching all dark skinned people for about a year now. And it is just starting to touch white skinned people.

When you start hunting witches, its only the first step thats hard. After that … **

I’m not sure I’m understanding you - the lady who was mistakenly deported to India is Indian, with an Indian complexion and all. Certainly not lily-white looking. When you say it is starting to touch white skinned people, what are you referring to?

[feath]

Sorry if it wasn’t clear, I was pulling in info from another conversation. There have been rumors of things happening to folks who are not dark skinned…but, as I said, thats another conversation.

INS officals must speak with their supervisor. They do not have the Okay to kick someone out without the Sup’s verification. They sent her to India, because that’s where she came in from. (they would have sent her back to whatever country she flew in from).

It has been known, that a person will fly back and forth several times, as the two governements fight over legalitys. I heard a story from a UK INS guy, who told me about a guy who was flown 8 times to Belgum…they said the paper work was not correct, and flew him back. 8 times, this poor guy made the flight. By the end of it, he was begging to be put in jail. He was willing to confess to anything. And his only problem was he filled out the form wrong.

[Kimstu]

Expect to see a lot more of this sort of criminal idiocy. I have heard horror stories about incidents like a grad student returning to school in the US from India being summarily jailed and deported because he protested when US Customs wanted to confiscate his laptop for inspection.

I am sympathetic to responsible officials sincerely trying to be vigilant and fair in anti-terrorism measures, but incidents like this suggest that INS/Customs ranks also include a number of ignorant assholes who would rather ship an innocent person halfway around the world than admit they could be wrong about something.

wolfman: An Indian, with a hispanic name, and a Canadian passport is unusual and suspicious […]

Not to anyone with half a clue about India and Indian immigrants in North America. Canada has tons of people of Indian descent, and India has tons of people with Portuguese ancestry and Portuguese surnames. I don’t mind if the average US citizen isn’t aware of this, but it makes me rather nervous if the freaking **officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who are supposed to have some professional knowledge concerning typical immigration patterns in North America, don’t have a clue about it.

(“Cruz says an officer also asked her why her surname was not ‘Singh’ and commented that it was clever of her to use a Spanish name.”
:rolleyes: So, this taxpayer-supported US government official who is supposed to be somewhat knowledgeable about foreign immigrants thinks
that just because she’s Indian, her surname should be “Singh”. Swell.)

“Suspicious”? Like a terrorist coming in from India, whose passport says they were born in India, would be likely to think that using a Hispanic-sounding name would make them less noticeable than using an Indian-sounding name? In what kind of comic-book spy-thriller universe does that sound plausible?

SmackFu: She didn’t have to travel through the U.S., did she?

Oh yeah, now that’s the kind of message our country, not to mention our tourism industry, is hoping to send to the rest of the world, not to mention our own citizens who travel abroad. “Listen up! If you happen to look in any way ‘suspicious’ to any ill-informed agent when you’re going through customs, you better believe that we’ll throw you in jail and ship you off to a distant country without any namby-pamby pretense of listening to what you have to say for yourself! And if you don’t like that, well then, you don’t have to travel through here, do you?”

That’s what they call a “very long-term anti-terrorism strategy”: i.e., annihilate our economy and alienate the rest of the world to such an extent that eventually we no longer have anything worth blowing up, at which point the terrorists will lose interest. :rolleyes:

[matt_mcl]

She didn’t have to travel through the U.S., did she?

I suppose not, and mercifully, I don’t either.

[mhendo]

Maybe this is the sort of thing Carolyn Parrish was thinking about when she made her little gaffe.

While it was far from even approaching the sort of humiliation and anxiety that this woman suffered, i also was subjected to some hostile treatment from a US Immigration officer over my Canadian passport.

I was born in Canada, but lived most of my formative years in Australia, so i have an Aussie accent. In 1996 i was visiting friends and family in Vancouver with my girlfriend, and we decided to rent a car a spend a few days in Seattle. We had planned for this in Australia, where my girlfrind had obtained the appropriate stamps from the US consultate in Sydney to put in her Australian passport. I had my Canadian passport, of course, which just gets waved through at the border (at least it did back then).

Well, we got to the border and discovered that, despite being told by the US consulate in Sydney that my girlfriend had everything she needed to get into the US, she actually needed some other stamp or form that was going to cost $US6.00. Also, they only took cash, and only US money. So my girlfriend had to wait at the INS office while i drove through the Peace Arch checkpoint and into the US to look for an ATM and get some US cash.

Upon my return, we sorted out my girlfriend’s problems and then, despite the fact that they had already let me into the country and watched me drive off and then return, the boofhead immigration dude decides that it’s time to give me a hard time as well. He starts going on, asking me why i have a Canadian passport and an Australian accent, and wanting all the details of my life.

I explained that, although i had spent much of my life in Australia, i had been born in Canada. “How’d that happen?” he asked. I almost laughed, and then proceeded to explain to him that a person tends to be born in the same place that his mother happens to be when the pregnancy reaches full term. Any other scenario is not really an option.

He sensed that i was getting irritated (even someone as thick as he couldn’t miss it), and then proceeded to give me a little lecture on what was acceptable in America: “You gettin’ mad? You don’t wanna do that. You know where you are now? You know? You’re in the United States now, and we don’t put up with that sort of thing down here.” I just plastered a stiff smile and bored look on my face, and proceeded to answer in monosyllables for the next few minutes until he had enough and let us go.

Cunts.

[akennett]

I would like to offer an apology to all Canadians for the mindless, oxygen-wasting pieces of shit that we have running our country. There’s absolutley no excuse for this. If they thought the passport was suspicious they should have contacted the consulate or some Canadian authority to have it verified. I am absolutely embarrassed by the stupidity of our government employees.

[Caffeine.addict]

There are quite a few things in this story that piss me off greatly.

1. Is it that hard for the fucking INS to figure out that this woman was married to a Canadian whose last name was Cruz? Granted her maiden name is Portuguese which isn’t that unusual considering that Portugal had a colony in India for three hundred years.

2. Why the fuck didn’t they call the Canadian consulate to have someone verify if it was a fake passport or not? How the fuck would they know if it is a fake or not?

3. Why the fuck didn’t they call the Canadian consulate like the woman asked?

I’m by no means a Republican but I hope that Bush can get the the civil service exemption for the Department of Homeland Security because they desperately need to clean out some of the dead wood in the INS.

If I were a Canadian of color, I sure as hell would make a point to not travel on any U.S. airlines or have any connecting flights in the U.S. because God only knows what the INS might do to you.

Canada needs to raise a big diplomatic stink about this type of treatment of their nationals by the U.S. If Canada had deported a U.S. citizen to a country like Cuba, it would be on the front page and people would be outraged. I hope the level of public outrage on these cases forces Canada’s government to take a stand.

[Helen_s_Eidolon]

Goddamn.

I fucking hate this. This is an awful trend.